Philip> On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, Mark Leisher wrote:
>> There may some day be a use for the Unicode codepoint 0x0000. It might
>> be better to make this 0xFFFF, which is a guaranteed non-character in
>> Unicode and probably in ISO10646.
Philip> Isn't that the natural character to use for null-terminated
Philip> strings? For example, if I'm processing UTF-8 text in C, "foo" is
Philip> equivalent to 0066 006F 006F 0000. In which case, it's very much
Philip> in use already.
Yes, zero is a "natural" terminator for strings. But the first character in
the source string that maps to zero will truncate the output string, leaving
you with a partial conversion and little idea if it was an algorithm problem
or a character mapping problem.
If the converted string contains 0xFFFF, it will be pretty clear the source
text had bogus characters the moment you display it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Leisher
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